Percy argues that most go through life witnessing not the actual world but their preconceptions of it.

a brave new world of persistent good fortune, joy without trouble, felicity with no penalty.

A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center shows that almost 85 percent of Americans believe that they are very happy or at least happy.

To strive to be happy all the time is necessarily to repress inevitable sadness.

people with “something eating at them” are more interesting than those who are merely content.

We try to embrace, then, the sad fact that the world most wants to forget: we all die, and in our dying is, paradoxically, our living.

Blake believes that the sublime arises from a sensual scrutiny so intense that it penetrates to an unbounded energy at the heart of distinct forms.

melancholy connects us to our fundamental being.

mortis? We wonder, then, if the obsession with happiness is, at the end of the day, a kind of unknowing necrophilia. We wonder if the desire for security is a hope for permanence, and we wonder if this hope for unchangeableness is a yen for death, the ultimate security blanket.